Add or remove a crawl component (SharePoint Server 2010)

SharePoint 2010

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010

Topic Last Modified: 2014-04-09

In Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Search, crawl components process crawls of content sources, propagate the resulting index files to query components, and add information about the location and crawl schedule of content sources to their associated crawl databases. Crawl components are associated with a single Search service application. You can distribute the crawl load by adding crawl components to different farm servers.

You can decide which servers in a farm will participate in crawling by creating a crawl component on that server. If you want to balance the load of servicing crawls across multiple farm servers, add crawl components to the farm and associate them with the servers you want to crawl content.

Warning

Before you add or remove a crawl component, we strongly recommend that you confirm that all content sources are idle. To check whether all content sources are idle, you can go to the Search_service_application_name:Manage Content Sources page and check the value in the Status field for each content source. A value of Idle in the Status field for a content source indicates that no crawl is in progress.
If one or more content sources are not idle before you add or remove a crawl component, tables in the crawl database can become inconsistent. In this case, active crawls will not resume or stop, which will make it necessary to reset the search index and recrawl all content.
To ensure that all content sources are idle, you can wait until all crawls complete normally, or you can manually stop each crawl that is in progress. For information about how to stop a crawl, see Start, pause, resume, or stop a crawl (SharePoint Server 2010).

In Central Administration, in the Application Management section, click Manage service applications.

On the Service Applications page, click the name of the Search Service Application to which you want to add a crawl component.

On the Search Administration page, in the Search Application Topology section, click the Modify button.

Note

The SharePoint Search topology cannot be changed in Standalone installations.

On the Manage Search Topology page, click New, and then click Crawl Component.

In the Add Crawl Component dialog box, in the Server list, click the farm server to which you want to add the crawl component.

In the Associated Crawl Database list, click the crawl database you want to associate with the new crawl component.

In the Temporary Location of Index field, you can optionally enter the location on the server that will be used for creating the index files before propagating them to the query components. If you want to accept the default location, leave the contents of this field unchanged.

Click OK to add the new crawl component to the job queue.

On the Manage Search Topology page, click the Apply Topology Changes button to start the SharePoint timer job that will add the new crawl component to the farm on the specified server.

Note

You can make other changes to the Search topology and then apply them all at once by clicking the Apply Topology Changes button.